Jesus People Jubilee: Forerunners of Awakening

(This is the first of four posts devoted to the Jesus People and their iconic connection to the Fourth Great Awakening of God’s people in America. — Author note)

2017 is the jubilee year of the Jesus People. We are 50 years on from a 1967 eruption of faith launched on deserts and beaches of America’s West Coast.

The United States was mired in the Vietnam War and the sometimes violent opposition to it, race rioting in her major cities, and a political program called The War on Poverty that fundamentally restructured millions of American families and the way all American families educated their children.

Advertisement - story continues below

None of these phenomena brought people closer to God, nor to abundant life — quite the contrary.

Yet when a bunch of drugged-out hippies were miraculously brought down from drugs and into the high of life in God’s Holy Spirit they found freedom substituted for bondage and the Jesus People became the Third Great Awakening in American history.

There were two previous outbreaks we called Awakenings. The first rose during the 1730s to 1740s. At that time there were no Americans; there were enclaves of British expats clustered along the Atlantic Seaboard in 13 British colonies; some were already pushing west.

Although each colony was founded and populated by Christians and several in the Northeast were avowed plantations for missionary purposes, spiritual fervor had been replaced by negotiated doctrinal standards on the one hand and rank apathy on the other.

Advertisement - story continues below

Some pastors felt this as dis-ease and led their flocks in a season of repentance. In this context itinerant preachers began to deliver fiery messages about the need and the opportunity for radical encounter with the Living God. These messages were often delivered in the fields and pastures of the Connecticut River Valley.

Many thousands experienced this radical encounter and thousands more were impacted by it. Crime was seriously reduced, families restored, and a sense of social cohesion birthed in the colonies. People began to see themselves as Americans in light of shared experience.

This first Great Awakening produced an American identity. It became the catalyst in which a new people fought the American Revolution and adopted the American Constitution.

The Second Great Awakening was birthed much the same as the first. This one broke in the canebreaks of Kentucky and Tennessee and throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys.

Advertisement - story continues below

As the 19th century dawned, social conditions were similar to those preceding the previous Awakening, only worse. Alcohol and family abuse were rampant on the frontier and in the older communities. People scrabbled to make a living and cared about little else; the connection between spiritual health and a healthy socio-economic structure was ignored.

Again, a few pastors led their people into a season of repentance, more from desperation than insight. Although the level of education among pastors was quite high, this second Awakening was largely driven by circuit-riding preachers and evangelists with more passion than preparation. It did not matter, because it was more about charisma than competence; there would be a need for educated leadership later, as there always is.

The fruit of this outbreak was more character shaping than establishing for the nation; once again the impact was felt well beyond the hundreds of thousands who experienced a direct encounter with the Living God. The movement to abolish slavery began in this context, as did the temperance movement, free public education and pressure to end the exploitation of working people.

Stereotypes of camp meetings and deliverance from demons are real as far as they go, but they fail to approach the breadth and depth of the phenomenon as they deny the immense benefits for all Americans. The national character, so far as it embodies “send me your tired and your troubled,” was forged in this Second Great Awakening.

Advertisement - story continues below

America following the Second World War was spiritually and humanly exhausted. Our war machine had performed at unprecedented levels. We led the victory over two adversaries thousands of miles apart, only to find Communist Russia rising to replace Nazi Germany as an empire bent on world domination; it was soon joined by Communist China.

The Korean conflict coming on the heels of the larger war left us on spiritual empty. People turned inward; focus was more and more on building the mightiest economic engine ever known and reaping the material benefits denied to most during the Great Depression that preceded the wars. Nationalist movements clamoring for our assistance and domestic minorities seeking their rightful piece of the American Dream were considered too much and too soon.

Whatever looked like “normal” was what most Americans wanted.

Conditions were ripe for a Third Great Awakening.

It was on the way. It required only the necessary desperation in a critical mass.